Wheaton's book balances nicely the needs of an eager readership who already know his website with an introduction that allows for people like me who hWheaton's book balances nicely the needs of an eager readership who already know his website with an introduction that allows for people like me who hardly remember him at all. The book presents a roughly chronological series of essays about trying to find work as an actor trying to recover from his image as a Star Trek actor.

A few thoughts:

- Wheaton's strength is his honesty. He does a great job explaining what makes him happy and sad, of really documenting the difficulties he's faced trying to gain legitimacy as an adult actor, and of the continuing struggle he has had with the past. - Star Trek looms large over the book, and it presumes you know who he is--at least--from that world. The journey of the book could really be called "Running from Wesley Crusher," as Wheaton tries to deal with this ever-present aspect of his work. - The inside baseball about auditions and acting works well throughout the book, though sometimes it strays a bit too much into dwelling on his frustration with the vagaries of the acting world. I could have done with one or two fewer essays about how he almost got a part, again. - I particularly liked his discussion of the rising popularity of his blog and the concomitant boost it gave to his other efforts to make a living. By the end of the book, you feel like you really get to know Wheaton and you come to enjoy his voice quite a bit. - In style, Wheaton does better when he doesn't get too over-blown in description. He has a solid storytelling style, including good details and finding the occasional bon mot. I suspect his later writing contains even more of this.

All in all, a good read. It's well worth picking up from the library or buying a copy if your own interest intersect with the WilW world at all. It probably won't be that rewarding for people who wouldn't mark themselves with the Geek that Wheaton proudly wears here....more

A paean against the surveillance state in the vein of The Handmaiden's Tale or V for Vendetta. Imagines that in the cause of "security," the state wilA paean against the surveillance state in the vein of The Handmaiden's Tale or V for Vendetta. Imagines that in the cause of "security," the state will unleash a surveillance society and a morality campaign and regular people will suffer under the boot of oppression.

The art has a sketchy, scattered quality to it that works well, but it definitely yields the force of the narrative to the written text being superimposed on it. There are whole swaths in the middle of the narrative where the imagery adds very little to the story.

More highlights from Warren Ellis’ Bad Signal email list in the early 2000s. It’s an interesting snapshot of the mind of a good writer, watching how EMore highlights from Warren Ellis’ Bad Signal email list in the early 2000s. It’s an interesting snapshot of the mind of a good writer, watching how Ellis works through certain ideas over time and proposes notions that challenge comics industry gospel. Not for the general reader, but the Warren Ellis fan will appreciate it....more

This isn’t really a comic, but rather a compilation of the better posts from Ellis’ Bad Signal email list. It’s an interesting snapshot of my favoriteThis isn’t really a comic, but rather a compilation of the better posts from Ellis’ Bad Signal email list. It’s an interesting snapshot of my favorite comics writer in the early 2000s, with cool ideas about where the medium can go and what he thinks about lots of things. It’s also a bit too specific to its time, so it’s got a limited appeal. Not recommended for Warren Ellis novices (For that I’d say Planetary or Global Frequency or the glory that is Transmetropolitan)....more

Another novel in the Culture series, Surface Detail turns around several characters involved in a war over Hells. Banks’ SF novels take place in the fAnother novel in the Culture series, Surface Detail turns around several characters involved in a war over Hells. Banks’ SF novels take place in the far future (or seem to, at least), when intelligent life has spread across the galaxy (galaxies?) and interacts in all sorts of ways. The several interweaving plotlines in this tale revolve around an inter-civilization conflict over the maintenance of virtual-reality Hells by several societies. There’s a virtual war over whether or not to have Hells at all, and, well, it’s all very complicated. A few thoughts:

Like Star Trek, the civilizations in these books have a variety of rules about how they interact, and one of the main rules is that they aren’t allowed to trade technology “down” to civilizations of lower technological achievement. Presumably this is because the higher tech societies believe technological achievement and the ethical development to handle it ought to go hand in hand. Certainly Banks sees The Culture as an immensely ethical society. The no-down-tech policy also creates a lot of friction, though, as the people from lower strata connive to get tech from higher strata. (McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” teaches us, of course, that the technology itself affords the ethics that accompany it, so Banks’ assertion seems apt to me, though any society that spends time around the higher tech will learn its lessons even if it doesn’t get to play.) The Hells in this book are particularly interesting, as they are a self-created eternal punishment space constructed to mirror (or bring into practice) the religious belief in Hell that some societies have. I would hope that by the time a society can maintain a mind in a digital space, the moral level would have risen to the point where people understand that Hell is an unethical idea, and no God that has a Hell is worthy of worship. Fear, maybe. (More on this later, but it occurs to me that in this society, with Hell a verified destination, Pascal’s Wager becomes viable). But why one would create a Hell, I do not know. Oh, did I mention that the academics are from a quadruped species with two trunks? One of the plots in the story involves two academics who get themselves sent to Hell to experience the torments it offers, along with a plan for how to escape from it so they can testify to what they saw. Because despite the fact that their society is on the pro-Hell side, the society generally denies that these Hells really exist, arguing instead that they’re a threat to keep people honest — but in back rooms, they argue that they must be real because the threat just doesn’t work. My favorite characters are the Minds that run the big Culture ships. As in Charles Stross’ Accelerando, Banks recognizes that once we’ve created ways for digital Minds to exist in larger and larger structures, their potential for power and intelligence so far outstrips our brains that we have little hope of sharing power with them. Banks imagines the Culture in which Minds and humans strive for an excessively ethical state, focused on truth as a central ideal. Each ship has a physical avatar that it uses to interact with people, so throughout the book, the ships appear as characters as well as skyscraper or city-sized spacecraft. My favorite is the perverse warship the Falling Outside Normal Moral Constraints (or something like that), whose avatar is an impish, powerful bastard, not unlike Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. There are also plots involving: a Colonel in the anti-Hell forces who spends the whole novel fighting in a variety of virtual battlefields; a woman murdered by the most powerful man in a society (a kind of uber-Rupert Murdoch) who is reincarnated by a secret digital backup in her head who seeks revenge for her treatment at his hands; a secret plan by that mogul to build a bunch of spaceships; a mission by a Culture ambassador to the dead, and much, much more!

I liked Surface Detail better than the other Culture novel I read, perhaps because I knew what to expect a bit more, perhaps because the plot feels more concentrated than that one did. I think the plots weave together very nicely, and we get many new facets about the galaxy that we hadn’t had before. A wide-ranging, deep, thoughtful epic of a book....more

Ready Player One is the geek's summer adventure novel. Packed full of pop culture miscellany from the 1970s and 1980s, the novel follows the adventureReady Player One is the geek's summer adventure novel. Packed full of pop culture miscellany from the 1970s and 1980s, the novel follows the adventures of Wade, an egg hunter, or "Gunter," searching for the secret treasure that will give him control of the world's biggest digital asset, a kind of World of Warcraft/ Second life/ Facebook/ Google that distracts people from the awful place the world has become in the post-energy crisis 2048. I don't want to say much more about it, except to suggest that it's a great read for any geeks who grew up in the 1980s. A few more comments:

The level of pop culture obsession on display in this book is truly impressive. Not only does Cline bring to bear his considerable attention to the detail of geek culture, but he constructs a character in whom it's not improbable that all this would lie. This is not the first novel I've encountered that suggests the danger of VR is that we'll let the world go to shit around us once we plug in. Certainly Surrogates proposes the idea that if we're given a digital interface, we'll happily hide behind it. But the apocalyptic Libertarian tale The Unincorporated Man posits the turning point in the downfall of culture as the invention of convincing VR. I remember reading somewhere that one theory about why aliens haven't visited is that once a species can construct convincing VR, there's no reason to go anywhere else and risk physical death. At the beginning, it seems as if Cline is going to give a fair amount of attention to the problem of first-world wealth and third-world poverty, but this ends up being a minor note in the overall plot. I had thought there would be more RL adventure than there is. The vast collection of music, cinema, television, and comics in the novel on display are pretty damn amazing. While I'm not a master of all the things mentioned, I'm certainly good at/ a fan of most of them. This book really makes me reconsider the idea I had, a while ago, to build a MAME cabinet. Perhaps that will be my self-award for when I finish the book.... Wil Wheaton's narration is excellent, if you like audio books. His status as a geek icon and his clear knowledge of the subject matter makes for an enthusiastic narration. His gusto in shouting Monty Python lines works better than perhaps any narrator could have managed, Eric Idle included.

I really like this book, in case you hadn't guessed. It hits a lot of the triggers that exist at the heart of any over-thirty geek and most under-thirty ones....more

At the end of each announcement Radar made over the camp P.A. in M*A*S*H*, he said "That is All." So ends nearly everything John Hodgman does. At theAt the end of each announcement Radar made over the camp P.A. in M*A*S*H*, he said "That is All." So ends nearly everything John Hodgman does. At the end of each judgement on The Judge John Hodgman Podcast he says the same thing. I've recently finished reading his third installment in his COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE, That Is All. The book predicts the collapse and destruction of our world in the COMING GLOBAL SUPERPOCALYPSE, complete with a day-by-day depiction of the last year of the world. It's also chock-full of facts, both fictional and hilarious.

It's definitely a book that's better if you read the two previous installments (Areas of My Expertise and More Information Than You Require), though the almanac format of the books means you need not read the entire book nor read the previous installments to understand this one. That said, this book's narrative thread of the end of the world is both hilarious and amazing, and rewards a more continuous kind of reading than the previous books did. I don't want to give too much away, but I will mention that this book includes:

A discussion of sports and how to play them, so that you can be prepared to join one of the sports-themed cannibal gangs that will rule the world after the old ones rise. A continuous and amazing integration of Lovecraftian mythology at the hoary heart of the end of the world. In the tradition of long lists of various names, this book includes a list of 700 ANCIENT AND UNSPEAKABLE ONES. You will learn about the Dogstorm, a millions-large herd of dogs that sweeps across post-apocalyptic America, destroying everything in its wake. The book shows John Hodgman to have developed into a deranged millionaire since he became a best-selling author and pitch man. The photos and descriptions of his various luxuries are hilarious. Finally, the closing story, which purports to be an essay about his decision to leave the literary agent business, is both compelling and very interesting. It strongly suggests that should John Hodgman decide to write a novel, it will be both hilarious and amazing. It's the first bit of writing I've seen from him that works really well on other registers than nerd/ humor/ intelligent.

Shirky writes in a smart, accessible way about trends in the digital era. I've used both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus in my Writing forShirky writes in a smart, accessible way about trends in the digital era. I've used both Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus in my Writing for New Media courses, both to great acclaim. Cognitive Surplus engages with the question of what we do with all this extra time and work that has emerged from industrial society, now that sharing networks have blossomed in such a way that we can do something with it. A few thoughts:

- The first half of the book explains how it is that people have the initiative and time to do extra cognitive work on behalf of others. Among the more interesting observations is the idea that individuals will share with one another without economic gain. The underlying idea here is the Gift Economy, which Shirky touches upon a little bit but would have pulled him too far afield to spend much time on it. - The second half of the book is about the way that culture is changing to accommodate (or combat) this new communal production. The general thrust of the argument is that new media forms will supplant and inevitably change old media forms. The implied aspect (which is mentioned somewhat) is that the old media masters will fight these changes, but that we want to collaborate, and now that the barriers to entry are low enough, we will. - The last bit, "looking for the mouse," reiterates the central idea that this collaborative, massively multi-user modality is in fact the new default modality. To try and construct the old modality will be to fail. - The freedom and chaos-loving part of me loves Shirky's assertion that the only way to let these technologies develop is to give them "As Much Chaos As We Can Stand." He makes the very convincing argument that the (not using them in the political sense, but rather their traditional word definitions) conservative forces will always stifle innovation, and finding a middle ground is impossible because the liberal forces do not yet know what the technology can do, and are very bad at predicting it. - At the same time, I am an academic, part of a fraternity of conservative folks who study and preserve our culture, even if we are trying to steer the boat from the bow, watching the bleeding edge of change for unseen rocks ahead. My biggest concern about the new technologies is not that we'll stop thinking or anything like that, but that the rapidity of the change will throw the baby out with the literacy bathwater--that some of the modes of knowledge discovery that came from the internal "I" of the literate mind might be lost in the external "we" of the social digital world. In particular, the value of time and reflection seem most on the chopping block today.

But overall, I endorse Kevin Kelly's idea from WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS that new technology represents roughly 51-55% good change, meaning the forward-moving balance is always better. In that light, Shirky's ideas about how we should proceed in the digital age present a nice blend of theoretical and practical observations about the current cyberscape....more

Set in the nearish future -- 2040 or so--Istanbul, McDonald's book dances around contemporary issues as they may evolve in the old-and-new world of thSet in the nearish future -- 2040 or so--Istanbul, McDonald's book dances around contemporary issues as they may evolve in the old-and-new world of the Middle East. We follow the adventures of a natural gas trader, his wife who trades in antiquities, his neighbors who work for government think tanks, and a number of other characters. While the central plot of the novel seems to involve a nanotechnology terrorist conspiracy, there are many threads to pull together. Some thoughts:

I read this book for my SF book club, but I didn't finish it on time, so I knew much about how the book would end before it did. I have to say this took a lot of the fire out of the second half of the novel. McDonald spends a lot of time (too much, which is why I didn't finish on time) building up the characters and plots, which makes the denouement work well, but the path to get there is a bit bumpy. The characters are intricately drawn and thorough, each distinctive and realistic and understandable. While it took me a while to get into the novel because of the many characters I had to keep track of, once they were all oriented in my head, it was a pleasure to read. Someone in my book group complained that the ending was a bit too pat, that the threads draw together too nicely, and I can see the validity of this complaint if the characters were not intended to be part of a single narrative, but they're introduced with that design, so it didn't bother me. There's one narrative confluence that feels a bit too coincidental, but it adds drama to the event, so it works for me. I love idea of nanotech toys, but am pretty creeped out by the brain-chemistry and thought-altering nanotech that McDonald foresees as part of the future world. Everyone gets hopped up on different nano in order to work, think, trade, or fight just a little faster than the guy before them. Yikes! I like McDonald's choice to set the book in Istanbul, which is something many Western SF writers don't do. By engaging with another culture and considering how the future technology would affect life there, McDonald adds a new spin to the book that gives it depth and character.

Overall, a pretty good book with solid characters and good writing. However, the pace is too slow for my taste, and the first haf of the book is harder to get into than I'd like....more

Kevin Kelly’s nonfiction treatise explores the question of what we should make of the seemingly-independent course the technological apparatus aroundKevin Kelly’s nonfiction treatise explores the question of what we should make of the seemingly-independent course the technological apparatus around us charts daily. This apparatus, which Kelly calls the technium, both depends on and guides us, and our ability, or inability, to ignore its treasures goes only so far as we’re willing to become Amish in some way (even the Amish adopt new technologies, it turns out). A few thoughts:

Like Manuel De Landa in War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Kelly describes the “arc of the technium” in evolutionary terms, suggesting that technology is life‘s way of expanding in complexity, ubiquity, and a bunch of other -itys. DeLanda writes his book as a robot in the machine future, describing how humans led us to it. Kelly might not disagree. At the same time, Kelly is still skeptical of technology en masse. He suggests that each piece of technology should be understood and grappled with on its own terms, and doesn’t seem to be Kurtzweilian in his love of technological progress. That said, chapter 14 is pretty darn optimistic about the possibilities inherent in a technologically-advanced future. Part of me spent the whole book grumbling that Kelly doesn’t invoke McLuhan more, because the essential argument at the heart of this book turns on the way technology serves as an extension of man, something that drives and is driven by us. McLuhan’s seminal Understanding Media made the same argument in less accessible terms decades ago. I found the chapter on the Unabomber most compelling, since Kelly outlines his debate about whether or not to include Kaczynski’s writing in his discussion of the dangers technology poses for us. Kelly points out how Kaczynski and nearly all the anti-technology crazies like him take full advantage of systemic technology in order to produce and disseminate the screeds they write against technological society. The unabomber could have, Kelly suggests, cut himself off from the grid and actually developed a subsistence lifestyle. Instead, he bicycled into town and bought groceries and other supplies at Wal-Mart. If you only have time for a little of the book, I recommend chapter 13, in which Kelly lays out the nine trajectories evolving life forms (and technology) tend toward: efficiency, opportunity, emergence, complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, freedom, mutualism, beauty, sentience, structure, evolvability. These forces help Kelly make his final argument that technology ultimately helps us more than it hurts us, and that we’ve got a bright future ahead of us....more

Stand on Zanzibar is one of those novels you read about that has lots of accolades. It emerged from the soft-SF wave in the mid 1960s, and has a non-lStand on Zanzibar is one of those novels you read about that has lots of accolades. It emerged from the soft-SF wave in the mid 1960s, and has a non-linear plot and some dark views of humankind’s future. The story, which you don’t really get to for at least 50 pages, follows two men as they navigate the over-populated and teetering on the edge of global crisis world of 2010. One of them, an African-American executive at GT, the world’s largest corporation, is tapped to head up an economic initiative that will help a third-world country out of its poverty while also taking advantage of a gigantic undersea mineral vein. The other has spent the last decade as a government synthaesist, someone who studies the world and draws conclusions about it. He finds himself embroiled in a political nightmare as he’s tapped, uploaded with the skills of an assassin, and sent to a North Korea-like country to find out about a new genetic technique that will overturn the world. Interspersed among these chapters are numerous chapters providing context and detail for the world, through newscasts, blurbs, bits of dialogue, and brief scene sketches.

A few thoughts:

It’s often been said that science fiction is about the present, not the future, and this book definitely feels like it’s from the 1960s. It carries much of the doomed pessimism that pervaded the culture in the late 1960s, suggesting that racism and sexism continue unabated, that population explosion will result in massive eugenics programs, and that media will be out of control. The prejudices that trace through the society in Stand on Zanzibar‘s 2010 certainly still exist in our culture today, but they’ve changed in scope significantly. He doesn’t describe any progress at all, really. From that perspective, it’s a scary book. The eugenics laws around the world in the book have a cold logic to them: if you’re going to limit population growth, you might as well limit it to people who can have offspring with as few genetic defects as possible. But JEEZ, it’s a grim world to live in where having a baby without permission is illegal. What Brunner didn’t predict is that with the rise in standard of living, birth rate drops, so developed countries would actually not be having a problem with boom, but with population drop. The storytelling style of the book, very chaotic and hyperlinked — as one member of my book club put it, it’s like reading a Twitter feed at many points — has a prophetic feel to it, but it also highlights the main gap in the book: it challenges the reader to work very hard in order to dig out the story. From the science and technology angle, two things stood out as interestingly wrong. First, Brunner was unable to conceive of personal computers. He saw the world still running on the mainframe model, where a few super-awesome super-computers (with names like Shalmaneser, rhymes with teaser) do all the computing. He also didn’t have the language of DNA yet, which gives the discussions about manipulating human genome an interesting vague-ness. I noticed the absence of Watson and Crick’s discovery at the point when the book discussed collecting the gene-plasm of the parents in order to create an embryo in a lab. Brunner’s geopolitcs aren’t too far off, though. He predicted the unified Europe and describes China as the U.S.’s major diplomatic and economic rival. Russia, despite its prominence in the 1960s, has little or no mention in the novel. Weird.

There were two interesting quotes that I took note of. They’re included below, for your edification....more

Doctorow weaves a complicated plot in three stages, jumping forward in blips and blurps like Charles' Stross' Accelerando, but reduced in time by a faDoctorow weaves a complicated plot in three stages, jumping forward in blips and blurps like Charles' Stross' Accelerando, but reduced in time by a factor of ten. The novel follows the rise, fall, and aftermath of the "new work" movement, an allegory for the dot-com bubble and its aftermath. It weaves a whole bunch of near-future technologies that may make a big difference in our lives soon together with a story about economics both pragmatic and optimistic.

The first half of the novel feels too optimistic, buoyed by the same delight that the characters feel for these new kinds of activity. But the second half wrecks its characters just as the world around them crumbles. Doctorow's future is inundated with cool shit and plagued with stark poverty and an awful lot of making do.

I agree with some reviewers that Doctorow's writing lacks the kind of poetic voice we enjoy in a China Mieville or Margaret Atwood, but the story seethes with ideas, tossed out like M&Ms on the ground. I also felt like the book went on a little long, and that the early sections especially feel like summaries of vast swaths of BoingBoing (though to be fair, if Doctorow blogs about his ideas and writes novels about them too, this is to be expected).

At the same time, I thought the oscillation of the characters in the second half of the novel worked well -- each of them got a bit more complex, revealing flaws in the people we thought we'd liked, revealing qualities in people we thought we hated. The end was satisfying, t00. I'm glad he included the Epilogue: the story that finished in that section needed to be told.

This is my third adult Doctorow novel (Little Brother is aimed at young adults, and carries a distinctly pedagogical voice), and while I think Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom still holds its place for me as an important way to think about the emerging world, Makers will definitely hang around in my subconscious in a way that Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town hasn't....more

The DSLR Handbook is a pretty good starter book for people who know nothing about photography (like myself). It's written in an accessible, friendly sThe DSLR Handbook is a pretty good starter book for people who know nothing about photography (like myself). It's written in an accessible, friendly style that assumes you don't know a lot but also doesn't condescend. A few thoughts:

* The early chapters are the best. After you get past the chapter about how to put the battery into your camera (seriously), there are a couple "theory" chapters that explain how DSLRs work and why they're better than point-and-shoot cameras. There's also a helpful chapter or two about the different settings and what they mean. I also like the fairly long discussion of the difference between wide-angle and telephoto lenses, and why you might want to think about them. * As the book goes on, though, it becomes less of a book to read and more of a book to refer to (hence the "handbook" moniker, I guess). While this is useful (planning to shoot outside landscapes? refer to this chapter), it ruins the book as something you'd read to get an overall survey, mostly because he repeats himself over and over. I think the book would be twenty percent shorter if you cut out all the times he says "be sure to bring along a tripod, and use a cable shutter trigger." It's good advice, but goes a bit long in the tooth. This book also fails, as a handbook, because it's too big and pretty to carry in your pocket or your photo bag. The O'Reilly programming Pocket size books would be a good example for Freeman to consider. Perhaps this book could come in its present form, with a thirty page condensed version that could fit in a cam bag. * Freeman also assumes a level of interest and commitment to DSLR photography that probably exceeds the level of anyone using this book. In other words, if you have studio lighting and a dozen lenses to choose from, you probably don't need this book. But then again, I wouldn't have any idea why I might want studio lighting until I read this book, so it's a chicken-and-book thing, I guess. * My favorite bit is fairly early in the text, where Freeman talks about the questions you need to ask yourself when you're taking photos. There are about a dozen to think of, including lighting and Fstop and ISO and on and on. Then he says something to the effect of "Some people might find all these questions intimidating or annoying to ask. But as someone who has invested in an amazing piece of photographic equipment like a DSLR camera, you are clearly committed to a different level of photography." I was reminded of a late-night episode of a sports-memorabilia show in which they were selling Michael Jordan jerseys along with bits of the floor he played his last game on for $5000. One of the salesman's gambits was, "When people walk into your house and see this piece, they will know you're serious. They will know you are somebody."...more